Approve Pacific Gateway

Twenty years after approval of the master plan for redevelopment of what might be the most valuable bayfront acreage in the region, the property still sits with a rundown headquarters for the Navy, dreary warehouses and a parking lot.

Enough is enough.

Meeting today in Oceanside, the California Coastal Commission, which was among the agencies that blessed the project two decades ago, may vote to send it back to the drawing boards, as recommended in a staff report that says the plan may no longer be consistent with the state coastal act.

We expressed reservations in the past about the plan proposed by the Navy and developer Doug Manchester in 2006, arguing that its density of a new Navy headquarters, hotels and office buildings would wall off the space to the public.

Advertisement

But the Navy’s preference for the Embarcadero site is unchanged, and sending the project back for a new design would likely kill any redevelopment there for many more years to come.

Just as Coastal Commission staff now argues that things have changed along the waterfront, it is even more true that the state of the economy has changed – dramatically for the worse. San Diego County’s unemployment rate is an unhealthy 9.7 percent. If Pacific Gateway goes down, lost with it would be thousands of jobs and economic stimulus. That is unacceptable.

As San Diego struggles to break out of the economic doldrums, government should be doing what it can to help, not get in the way. Projects like this can’t sit on the sidelines.

The commission overruled its staff in approving the project 20 years ago. It should do so again today and let this project go forward.

The local startup thinks it has developed a strong operating system to spark the autonomous mobile robot industry, but competitors are fighting hard to promote their own technology in the nascent market